News & opinion on Greater China and the even Greater Beyond: by Biff Cappuccino.

Saturday, September 25, 2004

Violence & Courtesy

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Native-English speakers are courteous primarily out of fear that the lack thereof will result in a sharp and embarrassing harangue or a match of fisticuffs. On the other hand, there is little to fear in public as a Taiwanese citizen because most of the citizenry, when sober, is extraordinarily given over to avoiding confrontations. As a result, there is a pervasive lack of courtesy. And yet it's a cliche and a given to most Chinese that they belong to that most charmed of world nations whose many distinctions includes being the acme of courtesy. But clearly Taiwan, if not China, is the more likely the acme of something quite different: protocol.

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If you don't abide by the expectations of your Chinese host he or she will often become visibly angry. This isn't symptomatic of a connoisseur of courtesy but of a fanatic demanding adherence to set of esoteric cultural rules. It was a commonplace in Taipei until about ten years ago that refusing a cigarette from a local gentleman was near tantamount to challenging him to a duel.
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But surely, outside of this sort of thing, most Chinese people are courteous? Perhaps. It depends on whether one considers it a courtesy to fart in public, belch in public, shed one's shoes and pick the skin off one's toes in public, explore one's nose in public, step on people's toes in public, and rarely if ever say please, thank you, or sorry if it can be avoided, and so on and so forth. And while some will suggest that different societies have different standards, one sees the same standards arising here once people get money and leisure and the find themselves swelling with the desire to shine and distinguish themselves from the lower orders, even if there aren't any yet available.

As usual it's the more relentlessly competitive half of the species, women, who lead the way by refraining from clearing nostrils into the gutter and keeping their shoes on even if they've an itch. And while I'm allowed to fart at will, being a man and thus presumed ipso facto to be an incurable adolescent, I've never had a girlfriend who felt comfortable passing a ripe one through lingerie. And those Chinese with lighter skin populate the preferred half of the master race. The more wealth one accumulates, the softer one's tone of voice becomes to the point working-stiffs almost require an earhorn to conduct a conversation with you. There is a pronounced desire not to be seen sweating, to no longer wear one's lunch in one's teeth, to smell of a rose, an orchid, sandalwood, or the latest ester to emerge from a French laboratory, to wear gold, silver, and designer gear, to feign or be genuinely incompetent at blue-collar endeavor. In other words, whatever mechanisms drive our own class distinctions are surely driving class distinctions here as well.

An angry or violent Taiwanese citizen is most often someone enforcing protocol; they feel they have the combined force of tradition, justice, and the ancestors behind them. Not that the polite don't get pissed. But the polite are more concerned with the other person getting violent. To dodge conflict, people of courtesy pay attention to detail and go out of their way to minimize friction. Someone stressing protocol is the opposite: an enforcer, with the mindset of a constable, a censor, or a Red Guard; eager to take the initiative and employ anger or violence to insure adherence to their supposedly universal, but unluckily parochial, standards of conduct.

As such Taiwan's flatland denizens (as opposed to the aborigines, who can be very polite or very rude) are not deliberately rude but instead haplessly crude: bumping into one another like penguins, ambling in the middle of sidewalks like cattle, holding up traffic by stopping at corners to let their friends out of the car, and so on and so forth because people know there will be no verbal or physical retribution. For that matter, it has only been fairly recently that people have even begun starting to honk at cars that hold up traffic. So things are changing in the direction of familiar developed nation norms.

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Why? Because democracy is empowering and, once empowered, everyone gets a hard-on for verbal and physical violence. In authoritarian societies, such as those run under martial law or communism, folks are afraid to speak up and to act out their violent fantasies because you never know if the villain of the piece is attached to somebody important. If so, it could be curtains for you. Thus, people get in the habit of putting up with a great deal; ergo the most popular Chinese ideograph of the elder generation: endurance. The same folk, growing up in a democracy, would be more pugnacious, willing to harangue or issue an arse-kicking in their quest for higher standards of comportment, i.e. courtesy.

Interesting in this regard is my better-half, Clara. Whenever I move furniture or plants or whatever around the house, she typically stands and watches, doing absolutely nothing to help. It's maddening. In the English speaking nations, we don't have much patience for that, ergo the phrases "don't just stand there, do something" and "make yourself useful." Growing up in a society which lacks democratic spirit, Clara's learned that discretion is the better part of valor. In a corrolary to 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it', she doesn't show any initiative. In her world, the nail that sticks out gets hammered. In an unfamiliar situation or one where she doesn't understand how she can help, she waits for a command, for her marching orders. Initiative has apparently not been rewarded and probably been discounted.

But she's just one person? No such entity. We're all bees in a hive, automatons with pre-installed software.

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Another example of this passivity came up while moving to our pseudo-legal rooftop pad. One of the wife's colleagues showed up with her boyfriend du jour and a car. Clara and I loaded it up at the old place and unloaded it at the new place and then carried our stuff up several flights of stairs. We rushed back to the original pad and reloaded. This went on for a couple of hours, during which time neither Clara's coworker nor her quarry lift a finger to assist us. Nor did they manifest any shame while idly watching Clara and I get into a sweat like a couple of coolies. Maddening stuff by the standards at home. Interestingly, they did buy us a cup of ice coffee, using money, as is so often the case to handle situations. At home, things would be completely bass-akward. Friends would feel embarrassed and offer to lend a hand. The people moving would purchase a coffee for them.

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T.E. Lawrence describes a passive tribe reminiscent of Taiwan just a few years back, which is a way of saying I don't think Taiwan's values are stagnating and that things were much worse before. Here's Lawrence:

Turkey was dying of overstrain, of the attempt, with diminished resources, to hold, on traditional terms, the whole Empire bequeathed to it. The sword had been the virtue of the children of Othman, and swords had passed out of fashion nowadays, in favour of deadlier and more scientific weapons. Life was growing too complicated for this child-like people, whose strength had lain in simplicity, and patience, and in their capacity for sacrifice. They were the slowest of the racesof Western Asia, little fitted to adapt themselves to new sciences of government and life, still less to invent any new arts for themselves. Their administration had become perforce an affair of files and telegrams, of high finance, eugenics, calculations. Inevitably the old governors, who had governed by force of hand or force of character, illiterate, direct, personal, had to pass away.

Loving the old ways steadily, the Anatolian remained a beast of burden in his village and an uncomplaining soldier abroad... The burden fell heaviest on the poor villages, and each year made these poor villages yet more poor.

The conscripts took their fate unquestioning: resignedly, after the custom of Turkish peasantry. They were like sheep, neutrals without vice or virtue. Left alone, they did nothing, or perhaps sat dully onthe ground. Ordered to be kind, and without haste they were as good friends and as generous enemies as might be found. Ordered to outrage their fathers or disembowel their mothers, they did it as calmly as they did nothing, or did well. There was about them a hopeless, fever-wasted lack of initiative, which made them the most biddable, most enduring, and least spirited soldiers in the world.

Such men were natural victims of their showy-vicious Levantine officers, to be driven to death or thrown away by neglect without reckoning. Indeed, we found them just kept chopping-blocks of their commanders' viler passions. So cheap did they rate them, that in connection with them they used none of the ordinary precautions. Medical examination of some batches of Turkish prisoners found nearly half of them with unnaturally acquired venereal disease.

This wicked description of mental blanks has stuck me with ever since university, reminding me of the hometown yokels.

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Martial law, the murder and exiling of dissidents, and the profit-motivated brain-drain hit Taiwan simultaneously below the belt, between the eyes, and in the pocket-book. Many English-teaching tourists in the early days, myself included, on interacting at length with the dreadful souls manufactured en masse by martial law etc. felt like Lawrence did about WWI vintage Syrians: "...the Syrian -- an ape-like people having much of the Japanese quickness, but shallow -- they speedily built up a formidable organization."

The demand that others make themselves useful comes from an angry whimper: it's not fair that I have to do all the work. Out of this pathetic selfish rage emerges a grab-bag of actions and reactions that make democratic society proactive and can-do. For the comment that most often follows "Go on! Make yourself useful!" is something along the lines of a disgusted "Jesus, you're pathetic!"

This is how many of us grow up. And surely it's better to be forced to grow into adulthood competent and confident in one's ability to learn and overcome (the older democratic nations), than to be babied as a child and grow into adulthood insecure and incapable of learning how to overcome (Taiwan: a newly democratized nation with many decadent authoritarian traditions extant).

Crucial to understanding the strength of the modern developed nations is the more pervasive and encompassing degree of paranoia felt by citizens of the older democracies. We're held accountable and required to be competent across an almost inhuman range of human endeavor, with the result that we have what seems to many Third Worlders to be an almost super-human range of competencies. Third Worlders are most of all impressed by First Worlders because they presume we're natural-born capable on many, many fronts.

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For example, when cleaning up the veranda with a hose tonight, I sprayed water back and forth on the veranda tiles in reinforcing streams to press the dirt and murky water in an organized fashion farther and farther ahead to my destination, the drain. In other words I used a slashing motion to create reinforcing waves and prevent backwash, something which you would recognize immediately if you saw it and would consider child's play. Which it is at home, but here, it's almost like David Copperfield magic. But people here seeing this sort of thing, are usually seeing it for the first time. They're impressed. Just as they're impressed with mechanical skills (motorcycle and car repair), a broad knowledge of music and film, physical and athletic ability, and so on and so forth.

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As mentioned in a previous essay, even the ability to cross a busy street with traffic flowing in both directions is something that we've been taught as children, but which many people here have still yet to learn. Back home you're mocked, nay hounded, if male and incompetent with various mechanical skills, specific directions to practically anywhere within fifty miles, ignorance of popular culture on back to your parents' generation, and so forth. But here, as in most developing countries, there's no demand for this sort of thing and most people aren't going to do what they're not forced by familial, peer, or workplace pressure to do. The result is that we get to Taiwan, down on our luck with only a couple of nickels to rub together, and fall off the boat only to discover that we're Gods.

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And having witnessed the way which I used a hose, did Clara ask me how I did it? No. And when I navigate a busy street and catch somebody having trouble doing the same, does a person ask me how I did it? Nope. It's never happened. And it is this perfectly understandable social-mammal status-conscious fear of admitting ignorance and incompetence which reinforces the Third World and developing nation belief in our inherent superiority; i.e. our racial superiority.

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Of course, this is loony. But, most of the world is and will fight to the death to remain loony. Two billion muslims pray to a meteorite: the Kaaba in Mecca. 50% of Christians believe in astrology, a pagan cosmology, while nearly 100% celebrate Christmas with Christmas trees, an icon of a pagan German tree-worshipping religion.

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For better or worse, most of our species takes nonsense perfectly seriously, thank you very much. Magic, fetishes, talismans, ghosts, sorcerors, astrology, chiropractry, poultices, and hobgoblins: instant solutions to the more mysterious of life's questions. You can't get into the brainpans of Third Worlders until you take seriously the possibility that shooting stars and meteorites are demon slayers and until you can earnestly ask such questions as: who inhabits our shadows and why does he keep following us?

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Isolated hunter and gathering peoples call themselves by such titles as The People. Peoples whose ancestors were powerful enough to generate city states and empires call other peoples barbarians. That's where the Third World remains. Us & Them. The chosen, the elect vs. the barbarians. The manichean view: right vs. wrong, good vs. bad, sun vs. moon, hot vs. cold, stuffed vs. hungry, Us vs. Them rotten lousy bastards.

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For Third World folk not trained in the interpretation of events via impersonal systems, understanding the First World tribe is so much easier with the common-sense belief that they are a superior race. The only change in mental outlook required is for Third World folk to drop the notion that they're the superior race and turn it over to us.

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Naturally this turning over is done only grudgingly and with a whimper. Previously, everyone else was inferior. The tables are turned now.

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And so I posit that Third World rage is understandable to a degree if you keep in mind that we've displaced various Chosen Peoples across every continent and disabused them of the notion that they are de jure the best. And trying to persuade them now, in the democratic spirit of egalitarianism, that everyone is equal is not only counterintuitive to them, but offers them no consolation. For what they really want is to be number one, the best, the master race all over again. They won't be happy with anything else.